cover image Young Irelanders: Stories

Young Irelanders: Stories

Gerard Donovan, . . Overlook, $24.95 (223pp) ISBN 978-1-59020-030-8

Donovan (Julius Winsome ) writes convincingly about loss and survival in an Ireland where big gaps remain between what his characters want and what they have. The aging, recently fired electronics salesman narrating “Harry Dietz” drives on and on one morning in his bathrobe until he's pulled over and has to take a good look at himself. One of several stories about absent parents, “Glass,” follows a young boy who stops speaking after his father is killed, and his mother, trying to pretend she isn't a widow, accepts an inadequate substitute for her dead husband. Lyrical passages are less effective in such stories as “By Irish Nights,” which buries a tragic boating story within a description of Ireland's metaphorical and literal wanderers, cast adrift by politics and a troubled economy. In the main, however, Donovan has a spareness that matches the bleak lives he chronicles. (July)